Moonfort
by duckmunk
Summary: In which Lils and Johanna build a fort on the moon in a room in a well in Antarctica. What? I never did say it would make much sense.
1. What

**a/n [**_This is probably a horrible idea, but whatever. No one will read it. Hopefully. (Lils, I'm looking at you.) And, warning, this has absolutely no plot what-so-ever. Like, none. At all. It doesn't even make the slightest bit of sense. Turn away while you still can. Also every section ends with dialogue and it's driving me insane, but whatever, deal with it._**]**

**.**

Under a dome of stars, where the air is stiff and silent, a lone girl hammers the last nail into a wooden frame. She steps back, hammer and tools left forgotten on the ground, to admire her work. As of now, it's plain. A mess of wooden beams, really. To anyone else, they'd see a pile of junk, or a child's mess. But the girl smiles, because she sees the walls and the ceiling, the memories to be made.

She reaches into her back pocket, grasping for the phone with the black and white case, and is met with full bars of service, an anomaly. Quickly, she loads Skype.

Johanna: on your way?

Lils: almost there

Johanna: did you bring them?

Lils: of course

**.**

The first thing off the spacecraft is a pile of blankets and a startled scream. The blankets rustle, then one falls off the pile and a face appears, eyes alight. Next comes a hand, and the blankets are ripped away, one by one, until a girl comes running out. Feet scurrying over undisturbed dust and the roughness of the moon, no one questions where the laws of gravity and space have gone.

But, looking carefully at the ground beneath the hugging girls, one might notice that the footsteps have been carried away by a breeze, or that if one squints, one can see walls painted with glittering stars. The world is nothing more than an illusion.

The girl from the spacecraft steps back, laughing. "Guess what? I ordered hundreds of them. Hundreds!"

"You dwark, I said thousands!" Johanna exclaims, but she can't stop her excited smile. "And did you buy the pillows, too?"

"There'd be no point in life if I didn't get the pillows," she says, faking hurt in her voice that her friend would doubt her so.

Johanna grips the skirt of her dress to keep her from doing something stupid such as squealing or jumping up and down, or tackling her friend. "Can we get started right now?"

"Yes!"

Both girls go running to the spacecraft, laughing, tripping over uneven ground. Fake stars twinkle around them as they pull blanket after blanket from the craft, and pile them around the frame of their fort. Then as Lils finishes unloading, Johanna starts laying the blankets down as a patchwork floor. As the latter starts winding fairy lights around the beams, the former sprinkles the ground in pillows, not forgetting to pile them up in some places as makeshift furniture—she knew she forgot something, but in the grand scheme of things, how important are chairs, anyway?

In the end, they both back up, looking up at the king of all forts, their fort, and smile. It looms above them, tall enough that Lils couldn't reach the ceiling if she was jumping on the biggest pillow pile, and it's big enough to house six average sized guests plus three dogs. But the best part is the colors. Blue and yellow and green walls for the outside, all in different shades and patterns, with the light shining through the thinner fabrics. The inside is reds, yellow, and oranges—happy colors—and the pillows, every single last one of them, are purple.

When she can't contain herself any longer, Johanna runs forward, through the two purple blankets that make for a door, and collapses on the pillows in the main room. She lets herself collapse under them, until she's immersed in the darkness except for sole foot sticking out into the open air.

When Lils walks in the room, giving a slight sigh when she sees her buried friend, Johanna says, "Could you buy some more pillows at the store? We're out."

Lils just sighs again, but grabs the craft's keys out of her pocket. "You're so lucky we need furniture as well."

"Love you!" Johanna calls out, squirming under the pillows until she can peer out to watch her friend's departure.

"Yeah, yeah, sure."

**.**

When Lils comes back, arms loaded with bags of Boosts, Johanna shuffles out of the pillow pile to greet her. Lils blinks, caught red-handed with her load of candies, and Johanna glares.

"Where's mine then?"

Quick as a chipmunk, Lils drops her Boosts on the floor and fishes out an Alter Ego chocolate bar from the bag over her shoulder. It flies through the air, and Johanna catches it, looking at uncertainly.

"Just one?"

This time, Lils tosses her the entire bag, and Johanna grins, already tearing open the first package. Her mouth stuffed with chocolate—letting it melt tastes so much better than chewing it—she attempts to say, "Did you buy the furniture?"

But Lils picks up on the incoherent words flawlessly. "Yep. And I grabbed a few things from the pantry as well."

"More than just candy?"

"Mm hmm. Flour, sugar, butter, vanilla—"

"You just want me to make cupcakes, don't you?"

Lils laughs. "I'll bring the oven in!"

"You better have brought bowls and stuff, too!" Johanna calls after her friend.

**.**

They're sitting back to back in the makeshift kitchen, leaning against each other. Both girls are silent, content with the smell of warm chocolate in the air, while they skype back and forth, iPhones and iPads alight.

Lils: have you written our moonfort adventures yet?

Johanna: i'm too busy talking to you dwark  
>Johanna: besides, we don't have any adventures up here<p>

Lils: nerd  
>Lils: down here, you mean<p>

Johanna: whaetver  
>Johanna: wait, i mean, ugh<p>

Lils: haha whaetver

Johanna: shut up

Lils: shut down

Johanna: youre impossible

Lils: elbissopmi

Johanna: did you just  
>Johanna: why<p>

Lils: yes i did just  
>Lils: what<p>

Johanna: where

Johanna looks up from her screen after Lils doesn't reply, and swivels slightly, not so much that Lils will fall, but enough so that she can see her friend.

"You didn't reply," Johanna accuses.

"What?" Lils turns, too. "Yes, I did."

To prove her point, the girl shows Johanna her iPad, and sure enough, there at the very bottom of the conversation, Lils wrote 'when', but looking back at the phone, the word still hasn't shown up.

"Ugh," Johanna groans. "I hate technology."

"Agreed," Lils says. "We shall throw it all into the sun!"

"But, then what will I write on?" Johanna collapses onto the floor in exasperation, clutching a hand to her chest, but Lils just rolls her eyes, shoving her to the side.

"Paper, maybe?"

Johanna sits up immediately, her eyes narrowed in mock disgust. "Ugh, paper. You're so old-school."

"Whatever." Lils pushes Johanna back onto the floor, and the girl squeals as she falls. "I think my cupcakes are done."

"_You're_ cupcakes?"

**.**

Lils doesn't even think twice when the older girl suddenly sits up straight in the air, claims that the world is ending, and falls dramatically over Lils. Instead, she readjusts her book so it's over Johanna, and continues reading. Johanna sits up, squints at her friend, and falls again, this time sighing even louder.

"Do you mind?" Lils asks. "I've just gotten to the good part."

"I am having an existential crisis, Squish. I don't care about your book!"

"Well, I'm sure the book isn't too fond of you, either."

Johanna sits up once more, but before she can fall, Lils puts a hand up and stops her. "Yeah, yeah, loud sigh, I get it. Why don't you go look at the stars and ponder life?"

"Do you think the stars are out yet?"

Finally, Lils puts her book down and stares at Johanna. It wasn't that long ago that the two of them were painting the ceiling and walls with black and splattering them with glitter and sticker stars afterwards. She must realize that none of it is real, right?

"You dwark."

"No, no," Johanna says. "The real ones."

"The real ones?"

The only passage to the world outside has been boarded up and plastered with caution tape. This here, in this room, is the only stars they have in the entire well. Sure, they're are view stars shoved in with the time zones, and the sun room is technically one giant star, but to see the night sky alight? Impossible.

"Do you want to add a few more lights onto the ceiling?" Lils asks softly.

"Can we?"

"Yep, and we can make any constellation you want."

"Can we make one of us?"

"Duh."


	2. Happy Birthday

**a/n [**_Ooops, I made a birthday themed chapter. Happy birthday my wonderful little chipmunk /huggles/_**]**

**.**

"What are you doing?"

Lils' head popped over the back of the couch, startling Johanna into dropping her laptop. She picked it up quickly, careful to hide the screen, before glaring at her friend.

"Nothing."

"You're writing me a birthday chapter, aren't you?"

"No," Johanna replied, typing away like mad on the small keyboard.

"You're writing this exact conversation, aren't you?"

"Nope."

A group of pelicans waddled in through the door of the moonfort, making a mess of the carpet as the went. One circled around Lils, prodding her with his beak.

Grinning, Lils sat down on the other end of the couch. "You added in pelicans to make the story different, didn't you?"

With a few more clicks of the keys, the pelicans disappeared in a puff of smoke, causing Johanna to cough. A single feather floated down, landing on top of her head, the last remnant of what really never was. She brushed it away.

"Of course not. How silly do you think I am?"

**.**

It was a daunting process of making a cake while finding someone to blame if the cake ended up horrible. The pattern went something like: melt the butter, search under the cabinets, crack an egg, check behind the couch, sift the flour, search through the pillows, pour the batter into the pan, peek outside the door, etc. The end result was a lopsided cake—which was the best kind because you knew it was homemade—and a pelican that had gotten loose in the bathtub.

See, the cake had to be perfect and nothing less because the day was too perfect. If the cake was any less than perfect, well, you can't give a less than perfect cake to a perfect girl. That's not the way the world worked. But pelicans had different rules, and they weren't in love with perfect girls, so the cake rule didn't apply to them anyway. So, it was kind of a perfect plan, Johanna thought, which made everything that much more perfect.

Together, Johanna and the pelican made the frosting. She mixed while he supervised. All in all, they made a pretty good team.

Lils was somewhere high above them, knocking on various doors, avoiding the doors with caution tape, and reapplying the tape where Johanna had ripped it off. The well was an endless maze of corridors and rooms, and if she hadn't been the co-founder of the world's most complicated well, she'd have gotten herself lost in seconds.

Instead, she found herself more and more entertained as she added to the map in her memory. Some places sparked storied Johanna had told her when the girl's had gone searching separately for strange rooms. Somehow, Johanna had ended up in the Johanna-themed wing. Lils laughed to herself at the thought.

Sure enough, she passed the various rooms labeled 'Cheerios' 'Ducks' and 'Spam Queen Crowns'. At the end of the hall, when it split off into two more new wings of different topics, there was one door with a Post-It note reading: 'For Lils'.

Lils heard a ping from her bag, and peeked at her iPad long enough to know that Johanna was done, quote-on-quote, cleaning up—of course Lils knew she was baking a cake—and that she could come back. For a second, she almost considered walking back without opening the door, but her curiosity got the better of her.

The second the handle turned, the door burst open as if it had been filled to the brim, ready to burst, which in fact, it had been. Pounds of confetti flew out of the room and formed a pile in the hallway, trapping Lils.

When she finally climbed out, hair and clothes covered in the thin paper strips, she couldn't decide whether to be mad or to laugh. She imagined walking into the moonfort covered in rainbow confetti with a glare on her face. She cold could already imagine Johanna laughing at the sight of her, and it made Lils smile.

**.**

"Happy birthday to you… Happy birthday to you…!" Johanna sang while the pelican croaked along with her.

She held the cake in her hands, half of the candles lit—matches were DANGEROUS—while she balanced the pelican on her head. There was confetti sprinkled all over her, too, since the first thing Lils had done when coming home was tackle her friend in a hug.

They ate the cake whole afterwards—what, knives were dangerous, too. The pelican had been kicked out the second Lils complimented Johanna on the cake, and the latter took all the credit for it. The two of them, working together, managed to eat half the cake in an hour before they both rolled over, full to the brim.

They ended up lying next to each other on the pillow pile, still covered in confetti, chocolate smeared on their faces. Johanna was half asleep when Lils turned to give her an awkward lying down hug.

"Thanks," she said.

"Too much chocolate," Johanna whined.

"Ugh, you're such a dwark."

Johanna smiled. "Love you, too."


End file.
